Second Lecture

Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to arrive at a purely philosophical understanding of the activity of thinking in this way, and I can completely understand that minds such as Richard Wahle, who once clearly presented to the soul how perception actually only places chaos before our soul, and how such thinkers, who really only have before them what Johannes Volkelt rightly called the individual fragments of external perception juxtaposed next to each other, which thinking must first order — I can understand how such thinkers, because they become completely immersed in perception, do not manage to become immersed in the active essence of thinking, cannot bring themselves to recognize that, by experiencing the activity of thinking, we are completely immersed in an activity, and because we are completely immersed, we can connect it completely with our consciousness. I can well imagine how incomprehensible it is to such thinkers when, from the full experience of this activity of thinking, one responds to them with the words: In thinking, we have grasped world events themselves by one corner! — as I have expressed it in my Philosophy of Freedom.